Reality is like gravity. It doesn’t care what you or I think about it.
During last week’s Causal CMO chat, Mark Stouse laid out how many B2B tech leaders watch their GTM motion sputter into 2026.
Because here’s what’s true right now: Your CEO wants more MQLs. Your CFO wants proof. And the math says fewer than 1% of leads convert to closed deals in lead-centric processes.
That’s not a rounding error. That’s a broken model.
Mark began by making a critical distinction many of us miss.
He separated truth, fact, and reality.
“You have to be willing to see things as they really are. Not as you might want them to be.”
This distinction is important because most GTM conversations live in truth and taste debates or cling to outdated facts while reality gets ignored (actual win rates, deal velocity, churn drivers).
According to Gartner, 77% of B2B buyers say their last purchase was “very complex or difficult.” When buying gets harder, more leads don’t make buying easier. They just amplify existing problems in your product or sales process.
More also means more riff-raff and distractions. Quantity does not equal quality.
Pew Research found that when Google shows an AI summary, people click traditional search results 8% of the time vs 15% without one. That means your content can exist and still not get visited. Attention is rationed, trust is mediated by machines.
Mark didn’t mince words:
“It is accountability. It's provable, auditable accountability.”
If you can’t forecast outcomes, budgets tighten. Not because the CFO hates marketing. Because uncertainty costs money.
Mark reframed Opex entirely: it's not an “investment with ROI.” It’s a loan of shareholder money that must be paid back with interest. That means go-to-market spend that doesn’t actively improve revenue, margin, or cash flow is destroying the payback mechanism.
About 16-17% of your expertise becomes irrelevant each year. This isn’t age-related. It’s intellectual intransigence, as Mark put it.
The leaders who win will be “addicted to learning” (his words). Standing still means you’ll have the relevance of someone five years out of college within five years.
In practical terms, Mark put it this way:
“The more stuff in the door argument is an attempt to overwhelm an unpleasant reality under a sea of new, cool stuff.”
If your product is stale, churn is rising, sales cycles drag, or positioning is fuzzy, more volume turns into a megaphone for the problem.
“A great marketing effort on a crappy product or a crappy sales process only makes the company fail faster.”
But the deeper issue is if you’re solving for volume, your GTM structure is probably built for 2016, not 2026. Single-threaded MQL systems assume linear buying and individual decision-makers. The reality is buying involves committees, consensus, and risk mitigation. More leads don’t fix that. They will only make it worse.
Marketo co-founder Jon Miller echoes this too: measurement frameworks are breaking down, marketing is treated like a deterministic vending machine.
These aren’t separate problems. They’re symptoms of the same shift.
This isn’t a metric swap. It’s a system (and mindset) shift.
If you need something your CFO will accept, try this:
Forrester’s research backs this: multiple leads contribute to one opportunity, so treating a deal like it came from one MQL misrepresents how revenue actually happens. You’re changing how you think about the entire demand engine.
If you want a deeper dive, check out my 5-Part End of MQLs series.
OK. The following questions expose system problems, not just performance gaps.
Try to answer them as fast as you can (be honest):
If you answered “no” or “not sure” to more than two, you don’t have a lead problem. You have a reality problem.
And that reality problem most likely lives in your operating model, not your tactics.
Day 1: Pull 10 closed-won and 10 closed-lost from the last 6 months. Write the top 3 “why” drivers for each. One page.
Day 3: List where deals actually stall. Not CRM stages. Real moments. Internal disagreement. Budget reset. Security review. Implementation fear. Switching cost. Exec approval.
Day 7: Pick one friction point and fix it for one segment. A clearer proof pack. A tighter implementation plan. A risk-reversal story. A pricing simplification. A buyer enablement asset that helps an internal champion sell you.
Mark's advice on execution was practical:
“There is no requirement that you confront reality in public. Run a skunkworks. Learn. Make changes quietly.”
The point? You want traction without a re-org.
Interested in running a skunkworks project? Mark and I already covered that here.
If you’re clinging to MQLs, it’s most likely because you’re just trying to create certainty based on information you thought was fact and truth.
But once again, reality (like gravity) doesn’t care what we think about it.
Pick one “no” from the diagnostic above. Ask why until you hit a root cause. Then run a seven-day pilot that makes buying easier and risk feel smaller.
You can even use AI to help you. Check out how SaaStr did just that with their Incognito Test.
That’s how you close the reality gap. Not by fighting it, but by accepting it and working with it.
Missed the session? Watch it here
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Cheers!
This article is AC-A and published on LinkedIn. Join the conversation!
